Blindspots analysis is a method aimed at uncovering obsolete assumptions in a decision maker’s mental scheme of the environment.

Michael Porter

Michael Porter

Michael Eugene Porter is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School. He is a leading authority on company strategy and the competitiveness of nations and regions. Michael Porter’s work is recognized in many governments, corporations and academic circles globally...

 picked up on the theme and created the term "blind spots" to refer to conventional wisdom which no longer holds true, but which still guides business strategy. The concept was further popularized by Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author. She became known for her best-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and first month of World War I, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963....

, in her 1984 book, The March of Folly, to describe political decisions and strategies which were clearly wrong in their assumptions.

The following method for uncovering blind spots was fully developed by Ben Gilad in his book, Business Blindspots. The Gilad method consists of three steps:

Step One: Conducting a Porter’s Industry Structure – aka 5 force analysis on a given industry or segment (market), augmented with identification of possible change drivers, which are defined as trends with the potential to have profound (structural) effect on the balance of power among the five forces.

Step Two: Collecting competitive intelligence

Competitive intelligence

A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.Key...

on the target company’s top executives assumptions regarding the same industry structure as in Step One. Sources may include annual reports' letters to shareholders, autobiographies, interviews in the press, public appearances and speeches, industry meetings, congressional testimonies, conference calls with security analysts (transcripts are publicly available), and all other statements regarding vision and beliefs. An alternative technique is known among competitive intelligence professionals as “strategy’s reverse engineering” which looks for the underlying assumptions which can rationalize existing strategy.

Step Three: Compare the results of Step Two with the analysis in Step One. Any contradiction with the analysis in Step One is a potential blindspot.

Assumptions underlying Blindspots analysis

Underlying Blindspots Analysis is an assumption about the inherent biases of decision making at the top of organizations (business, government or otherwise) exceeding those of their subodinates or outsiders. While top executives in business and government organizations are smart, capable people, they are also vulnerable to several decision biases that come with their powerful positions, from cognitive dissonance, motivated cognitions, to overconfidence and ego-involvement. The impaired ability of leaders to see reality for what it is, and the more objective (less ego-involved) analysis of analysts and mid level planners means that Step 3 of the Blindspots Analysis can be a powerful tool for pointing to potential blinders.